DevAcademy, the first digital competences academy in Bucharest, changes its name to Digital Nation

9 Aug 2018

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DevAcademy, one of Bucharest’s education and technology incubators, is rebranding itself to Digital Nation. The change comes with the academy’s upcoming expansion nationwide, after 5 years of activating on the Bucharest market.

The community was founded in 2013, organizing yearly learning tracks and mentoring teams working on prototype development. More than 4,000 driven professionals have applied for DevAcademy learning tracks since then, drawn in by the community’s practical learning ecosystem, by the opportunity to develop themselves under mentorship and for the chance to work on real market projects. Mentorship and learning through doing are the essence of DevAcademy’s educational format. So far, approximately 400 young professionals have graduated DevAcademy’s learning tracks, many of them now working for global companies such as Google or Facebook.

Dev’s mission has revolved around upgrading education into a relevant, engaging process for new generations in order to support a sustainable entrepreneurial environment with high level specialists who can create added value. The community’s offering, therefore, includes a unique setup, a teaching ecosystem that makes the best of today’s dynamics and technologies in generating performance among trainees. More than that, within DevAcademy, the role of professors has been redesigned, empowering these professionals towards mentorship, whereas the working flow has been advanced to accommodate the multi-tasking mentality of new generations. In addition, teaching methods and tools have been borrowed from everyday connected life: social connections, automated notifications, and video conferences. It comes as no surprise that DevAcademy was the first organization of this type to switch its internal team to a virtual office setup, in 2016.

Over the years, DevAcademy’s approach has often been in the spotlight, drawing in attention and requests from all over the country. Starting this fall, the community’s educational and entrepreneurial programs are rolling out nationwide, promising performance through 100 percent digital learning and work. With this expansion, the community is rebranding itself to Digital Nation, putting its manifest and promise, that of digitizing Romania, straight into its name. To date, the program is singular and unique in approach on the Romanian market.

“Our [Romanians’] global advantage is still IT, which we can use to the country’s development through areas such as agriculture, fintech, smart healthcare, IoT. This is our ace, and we need to play it coordinated, as a country, in this global race, ” Paul Apostol, DevAcademy/Digital Nation founder said.

“From where we stand, here at DevAcademy, with all this background in digital education, tech projects and startups, we can clearly see that young Romanians want to stay in their country, it’s a clearly marked intention for many. At the same time, we see a lot of our young professionals who’ve moved abroad in search of better opportunities wanting to come back, they’d be interested in starting a business here in Romania. Today’s generations have very good digital competences, we’ve already had many years of experience in working for international corporations who’ve set up shop in our country, we’ve learnt so much from them and now I think we are ready for the next step.

We need to launch new directions that generate added value, through business collaborations and startups, by continuing to upgrade education and skill development. This is what we believe in. We’re at this crossroads of opportunities and we need to take the reins of this setup into our own hands, we need to venture out and move forward. Thus, we embark on a new mission, where our once Development Academy (DevAcademy) evolves into a Digital Nation, he added.”

The organization has been dedicating its efforts to enhancing education and motivation as means to achieve performance for the better part of the last 5 years. All these efforts, grounded in a lot of experimentation, in failing and then resuming, everything covered by a thick layer of courage, have contributed to building the growth ecosystem that is Digital Nation.

Digital Nation will begin its enrollment process in September and offers the following programming tracks: Backend, Frontend, Mobile Android and iOS), cybersecurity, cloud systems administration, social media marketing and UX graphic design. The team behind Digital Nation is the one that built the DevAcademy program, including technical specialists, business professionals, educational advisors and an active community of 230 members.